• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1120 0

’s nothing more than free, lazy living. When I was in Huntsville, I spent my days picking cotton in one-hundred-degree heat and humidity. I’m certain that kind of hard-labor punishment works, because I never want to go back there again. If prison weren’t so easy, people wouldn’t be content with going there. For too many, prison is a free ride on easy street. Those guys get an all-expense-paid vacation, and guess who’s footing the bill? Me and you! In the meantime, your taxes go through the roof, your insurance rates are sky-high, and your identity is put at risk while the guy who stole your car stereo or used your Social Security number lies around in a cell for six months trying to figure out who he’s going to harm next.

Jail should be reserved for repeat offenders, those people who can’t get it through their heads that they cannot continue to commit crime. For first-time offenders, I’ve found that money is a great deterrent. Anytime a criminal has to go into his pocket and come up with cash, it’s a big “ouch.” Money hurts those guys the worst. In this economy and in today’s society, we need to start looking for other means of punishment without it actually costing taxpayers money or becoming a burden to society.

Take someone like Leona Helmsley or Martha Stewart—two obviously brilliant women who had no prior criminal history. Their attitude and demeanor were why they ended up in jail. Like them or not, that’s not supposed to come into play when a judge is making his or her decision on sentencing. Both women were made to pay back the money they owed, suffered tremendous public humiliation, and were still sentenced to jail, where taxpayers had to pay for their incarceration. I don’t agree with that outcome. I think they should have been placed in welfare situations, sent to inner-city public recreation centers and schools, where they could have influenced the lives of those who were less fortunate. They could have had to spend their time showing people how to enter the workforce, helping them get back on their feet, and teaching them how to cook and sew. Surely their skills could have been taught to the underprivileged, easing the stress on our state budgets in the process. That would have allowed them to do something good for society without costing the state any additional money. And if the state still felt compelled to incarcerate these women, they should have been required to pay for their stay. They had the means and ability to subsidize the cost of their imprisonment. This type of alternative sentencing would have had a far greater impact on these women, because it would have knocked the chip off their shoulders. Instead, Martha came out of prison thinner, healthier than she had been in years, and with a television deal to do The Apprentice, while Leona Helmsely remained the Queen of Mean for the rest of her days, never showing remorse for what she had done to cheat the system.

There should be a government task force that gathers information from all of the white-collar criminals in the system, so we can learn from them how to better prevent these crimes in the future. Someone like Bernard Madoff will never be able to make up for the horrible crimes he committed against thousands of innocent people, but we certainly could tap into his brilliance to find flaws in the system so that no one will ever be able to get away with what he did again. He could work with a team of experts, the SEC, or the Federal Reserve to show them where the system is flawed and how he was able to get away with his crimes for so long. The government should make Bernard Madoff work with the IRS or financial institutions that are in the red, day in and day out, for the rest of his life. A guy like that knows the financial system inside and out. Force him to share his knowledge and expertise so that the government might have a shot at balancing the budget or shifting the economic downturn. All of this at no cost to the government because the criminals would have to provide it for free as part of their sentence. No vacations, no days off—Madoff